Tag Archives: Sailor Moon Crystal Act 19 – Time Warp – Sailor Pluto

The latest English dubbed episode of Sailor Moon Crystal to be added to Hulu and Neon Alley takes us to the future! Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto, has the gang following Chibiusa to the 30th Century Crystal Tokyo and getting their lives threatened by Sailor Pluto in the process. Who does she report to anyway? I sort of assumed her boss was Neo Queen Serenity, who probably wouldn’t appreciate her employee killing her past self, but I guess these rules exist for a reason! Fans of the Pokémon anime will recognise Sailor Pluto’s English voice, Veronica Taylor, as Pokémon trainer Ash Ketchum. Yes that’s right I’ve found another reason to bring up Pokémon. Sailor Pluto’s adult female voice actually sounds more like Ash’s Mom, Delia Ketchum. Does that make King Endymion Professor Oak?

We get to see Diana the kitten this week very briefly, though we won’t hear her talk until the next episode. One thing we also see but don’t totally see if Usagi and Mamoru having sex! This was hinted at heavily in the manga but in Sailor Moon Crystal not a lot is left to interpretation.

Next week is Act 20, Crystal Tokyo – King Endymion, has us actually hearing Diana’s voice, though we don’t yet know who will be voicing her. We’ll also see the purple version of Tuxedo Mask and get a bunch of backstory including who Chibiusa’s parents are! OMG who could it be?!

The next English dubbed episode of Sailor Moon Crystal will be available this Friday on Hulu and Neon Alley. Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto, will be available at 9pm Eastern Daylight Time. Daylight Savings Time is in effect so if you’re lucky enough to live in an area that doesn’t celebrate, Sailor Moon Crystal may be released at a different time than you had been expecting it! This week we go to the future and on the way meet Sailor Pluto who pretty much wants to kill Sailor Moon. Sailor Pluto will be voiced by Veronica Taylor. Anime fans may know her best as the voice of Ash Ketchum in Pokémon! Also appearing in this episode is the adorable cat Diana, though I am not sure who will be performing her voice at this time and we won’t actually hear her speak until Act 20, unless there’s some unexpected ADR.

Fans of Usagi and Mamoru will be excited to see them have sex in this week’s episode! This was strongly hinted at in the manga but not at all subtle in Sailor Moon Crystal. We’ll see if the English dub tries to smooth over this sex scene or if they fully embrace it.

The latest volume of Sailor Moon Crystal was released on Blu-Ray July 8th. As always my review is so late that the next volume, volume 11, is about to be released on August 12th. Regardless, let’s talk about volume 10. This set, like many others, includes two episodes on Blu-Ray in Japanese only. You can order it from sites such as Amazon Japan for 5194 yen, which is about $42 US plus shipping.

The art for this release features the often neglected but never forgotten Sailor Pluto! This is fitting since her character is featured prominently on the disk. We have Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto, and Act 20, Crystal Tokyo – King Endymion.

The charm is Sailor Jupiter’s Star Power Stick. This fits with the trend we’d been seeing.

Included as always is a 20 page full colour special book. This includes summaries for Act 19 and 20, art, character designs for Sailor Pluto and some of the Black Moon Clan, a page for Fumio Osano, Osabu, as well as two interviews. The first interview is with Akiko Kosaka, a composer who provided many songs for the original anime as well as Gekkou, the ending theme for Sailor Moon Crystal. The second is with Ai Maeda, the voice of Sailor Pluto.

Quality for this release is great, as always. The video is 1080p and looks better than the streaming releases. There are a lot of minor changes to the animation from the original version. Nothing from these episodes in particular jumped out as me as being significant. You can always check out Crystal Comparisons to see changes for any episodes, includes the acts 19 and 20 which are provided in this set.

The disk is Japanese only and also include a commentary track featuring Munehisa Sakai, the series director, as well as Shizuka Ito, the voice of Sailor Venus, and Misato Fukuen, the voice of Chibiusa. I can’t really comment on the content of these commentaries, as I don’t actually speak Japanese.

I can’t tell you whether or not it’s worth it to buy this set. Do what you did with the last 9. The video quality is great and it’s worth having for a hardcore collector but North American fans who like their money may find it makes sense to wait for the English dubbed and subbed release we will be getting at some point in the future.

Keep reading for more photos of this set including pictures of all pages of the included special book.

The latest episode of Sailor Moon Crystal is now available to stream on Crunchyroll, Hulu and Niconico. This week is Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto. The gang travels to the future and are confronted by Sailor Pluto, but not after Mamoru and Usagi spend the night together.

As the episode opens Chibiusa is pleading for Sailor Moon to come to the future to help her mother. Artemis doesn’t care much about that, but has the idea that if the Black Moon Clan is the one that attacked her future city, that might be where Sailor Mercury, Mars and Jupiter are waiting. It would be nice to think that the gang goes to the future to rescue Chibiusa’s family, but in reality they have the ulterior motive of rescuing their friends. Regardless they decide to go, but not before a sleepover!

Chibiusa wants to sleep at Mamoru’s, but she’s not alone! Mamoru tucks her into bed with Luna-P which is kind of funny because it looks like Luna-P is a full sized human and that the ball is just a head. Following this Usagi and Mamoru share a tender moment in which Usagi expresses her jealousy for Chibiusa and then they have sex. This happens in the manga as well. It’s fairly obvious what happens but here it’s even less ambiguous. They kiss, they lie down, they hold each other’s hands and they sleep together. We later see them the morning after where Mamoru puts a white shirt on Usagi. He’s wearing one, Chibiusa is wearing one and Usagi is wearing one. It looks like Mamoru has nothing but white dress shirts in his closet and that he loves putting them on women. I’m not sure why anyone finds this comfortable. These aren’t the shirts that Mamoru wears under his tuxedo. Those have little folds on the collar and frills along the front. These are white dress shirts Mamoru keeps seemingly exclusively for putting on women who don’t fit in them. Not sure I see the appeal of this comfort but it seems to work for him.

In the pre-sex conversation Mamoru sees Usagi almost disappear. What is this? Is Usagi meant to be disappearing because of all this time travel? This is really not how time travel works. If past Usagi was affected I can understand the time travel plot of having future Usagi disappear, as silly as this concept is. But here it’s future Usagi that is in danger while past Usagi is fading a bit. How odd. Perhaps that’s not what this is meant to be at all though. Perhaps this is an omen Mamoru has about the future dangers to Usagi.

We decide to go to the future! Everyone has one job and one job only to ensure this is a success! Hold on to Chibiusa’s hand and don’t let go! They do this and as soon as the time travel starts everyone lets go! Well done folks. This leads to some confusion in the future.

Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask, Sailor Venus, Luna and Artemis are the first to arrive at the Space-Time Door. Sailor Pluto is there and she doesn’t seem to care that they are Sailor Guardians! She uses her lethal Dead Scream attack on the whole lot of them. Time travel is sort of frowned upon and Sailor Pluto’s job is to kill people that do this. She’s pretty soft on Chibiusa though as she does nothing to punish her for traveling through time to save her mother. Sailor Pluto makes a comment which I’ve seen translated differently so it’s hard to interpret. In the English translation of the manga and of Sailor Moon Crystal she mentions that “You guys” have always caused trouble for her, which one would assume means Chibiusa and Sailor Moon. This insinuates that she knows fully well who Sailor Moon is and who she has become in the future but is still willing to kill her! The other translation I’ve seen in the French version of the comic simply says that Chibiusa is causing her trouble, or in another French translation that Sailor Moon treats Chibiusa like Sailor Pluto has. If Sailor Pluto really does know who Sailor Moon is murdering her seems like a pretty extreme reaction to running into her in the Space-Time Corridor. While the true identity of Sailor Moon is a mystery to the viewers and inhabitants of the 20th century it doesn’t seem like it’s something she keeps secret from the future inhabitants of Crystal Tokyo.

We learn that Chibiusa is a Princess! Boy I wonder who her parents are then? We see an image of her in a princess dress that is very similar to the one Princess Serenity and the young Queen Serenity wore. Perhaps this is simply the style in the future.

The villains this week are Chiral and Achiral of the Black Moon Clan. In the original anime they were Droids but in the manga and Sailor Moon Crystal they are human. In the manga Chiral is white and Achiral has darker skin. In Sailor Moon Crystal they are white and whiter. What’s next. A white Sailor Pluto? In the manga Sailor Pluto has darker skin. She isn’t black but she is certainly more tanned than the other Sailor Guardians. In Sailor Moon Crystal she’s not much darker than most of the other characters.

While being attacked Sailor Moon tries to use her Cutie Moon Rod but is unable to. We see it partially in black and white but it’s handle is still in colour. An obvious animation error which I expect to be fixed in the Blu-Ray release.

We get to Crystal Tokyo. It’s really bad here. We get a look at what it was like before the “explosion” and it looked quite nice but we also see an image of Chibiusa amongst a lot of bodies of what appear to be normal inhabitants of the city. Their clothes are completely ancient looking. They seem to match closely to what we saw in Silver Millennium on the Moon back in the day or even on Earth during this undetermined time period. Surely it’s not that far fetched that society would revert to some classic looking styles in the distant future. Some formal wear resemble very old clothing in many ways, such as the Tuxedo that King Endymion wears or the dress that Neo Queen Serenity wears. Why then does Chibiusa have a 20th century style school uniform? Her 20th century clothes stick out amongst these other examples of clothes which appear to some 1000 years older, all of this being set 1000 years in our future. But what do I know about style?

We get a nice look at Neo Queen Serenity. She’s lying on what looks like a tomb. It has an inscription on it that says “< <>>”. What’s that about? It looks like Roman Numerals to me, but what do they mean? I wondered at first if perhaps this was Neo Queen Serenity’s birth and death dates. She would be born around 1978 and would have died some time in the 30th Century, that being the year 2900 to 2999. MDC is 1600. CXXXIII is 133. I can’t make any sense of this. Anyone have any thoughts on that? One notable thing is that Neo Queen Serenity’s hair appears to be white, not the blonde that it should be. This could just be an artifact of the Crystal which is enveloping her.

Next up is Diana the cat! We learned earlier this week that she would be voiced by Shoko Nakagawa but we don’t actually hear her say anything in this episode. Her presence is overshadowed by the appearance of a familiar face. Sailor Moon immediately recognizes him as being the future version of Tuxedo Mask. Only this man is not dressed in a black Tuxedo but instead all in white. Why not lavendar? King Endymion in the original anime has a lavendar Tuxedo but is this not the case in the manga? Indeed he is almost always seen in black and white and wearing a very light coloured outfit but it is mentioned as being lavender and is shown in the opening colour pages of Act 20 as being of a lavender colour.

A cool effect exists for this episode. Whenever a character had an extreme emotional reaction, surprise, anger, shock, they showed a funny expression with a comical border. Fans can’t help but notice the similarity between these borders and those used in the original English dub by DiC. These borders were used at the beginning in the episode previews and again at the end during the “Sailor Says” segments. The one included below for comparison is from the episode preview for the second episode.

Next up is Act 20, Crystal Tokyo – King Endymion. The next episode preview drops of bit of a spoiler. It’s already been stated that King Endymion is the future version of Tuxedo Mask. The preview has Chibiusa calling him “Papa”. We now know, as if we couldn’t guess it, that Mamoru is Chibiusa’s father. It’s not much of a stretch to figure that her mother, Neo Queen Serenity, is actually Usagi. The series has not done a terribly good job of trying to hide this from us but I feel like by now we are expected to have figured this out a while ago.

Keep reading for more screenshots from this episode and the next episode preview.

The next episode of Sailor Moon Crystal, Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto, will become available to stream on Crunchyrull, Hulu and Niconico starting this coming Saturday April 4th. The show will be available starting at 7pm Japan Standard Time which is 6am Eastern Time, 3am Pacific Time. This week the gang travels to the future and meets Sailor Pluto, the guardian of the Space-Time Door.

Sailor Mercury, Mars and Jupiter remain kidnapped leaving just Sailor Moon, Sailor Venus, Tuxedo Mask, Luna and Artemis to travel to the future with Chibiusa to save her mother. On their trip to 30th Century Crystal Tokyo they are confronted by Sailor Pluto. Will she kill them for trying to travel through time?

More importantly this week Mamoru and Usagi appear to have some sex. Is this the first time this happens? That’s not something we could pretend to understand. It’s been a year since Usagi first slept at his place and a lot can happen in that time. Indeed it’s debateable what even happens here but Mamoru grabs Usagi, lays her down and starts kissing her right before an abrupt scene transition to where Luna and Artemis are also shown sleeping together. They usually sleep in different houses so it does not appear that any sexual activity has happened between these two, but it will at one point in the next 1000 or so years! This episode will briefly feature Diana, Luna and Artemis’s daughter from the future. Her voice actor was confirmed earlier this week as being Shoko Nakagawa, an actress and singer best know for being on the Pokémon Sunday variety show.

The new voice of Diana for Sailor Moon Crystal will be Shoko Nakagawa. This announcement was made on the Sailor Moon Official Site which included an image of Diana which is included above. Shoko Nakagawa is a media personality best known as the presenter of Pokémon Sunday, a variety show about all things Pokémon. She is also an actress and singer, having performed a great number of anime series opening and ending themes including many for the Pokémon anime and movies.

Diana is the future daughter of Luna and Artemis who lives in Crystal Tokyo. She is Chibiusa’s good friend, much in the same way that Luna and Artemis are Usagi and Minako’s companions. While Diana did not appear until Sailor Moon SuperS, the 4th season of the original anime, she appears much earlier in the manga. Diana’s first manga appearance is at the end of Act 19, Time Warp – Sailor Pluto, which is this coming Saturday’s episode which will be available on April 4th. Diana appears only briefly at the end of this chapter of the manga, vocalising little more than a simple meow. We will likely not have Shoko Nakagawa saying much until Act 20, Crystal Tokyo – King Endymion, which will be available April 18th.